I very much enjoyed Jamie Ford’s first novel, Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, so I had relatively high expectations for this book. Once again, Asian-American author Ford brings us into a little-known corner of American immigrant history. This time, it’s the Chinese community in 1920s and 30s Seattle, and the involvement of Chinese musicians and actors in the entertainment world — in opera, music halls, and eventually in the nascent film industry, before Hollywood became the centre of the American film world.

Another world we get to glimpse in this novel is that of orphanages in the period. The main character, William, is a 12-year-old Chinese boy grows up in a Roman Catholic orphanage, not knowing for sure whether his parents are dead or have abandoned him. (The fact that most orphans of the time were not in fact orphans, but children whose parents gave them up because they could not afford to raise them, is very well explored here). He comes to believe that the Chinese movie star Willow Frost is actually his mother, and sets out on a quest to find her.

While it’s clear that Ford has done his research and the glimpses of history we get in this novel are fascinating, the book didn’t connect with me emotionally as well as I’d hoped. I certainly found it enjoyable, but something about the way he wrote kept me at an emotional distance from both William and Willow, unable to full feel the terrible experiences that they go through. For this reason I’ll have to mentally file this book under “liked it but didn’t love it,” but I certainly learned things I didn’t know before about the places and time period, which is valuable in and of itself.